Blog posts with "espionage"

According to a Federal News Radio article entitled FBI investigating NASA whistleblower reports of Chinese data breach, Congressman Frank Wolf informed the FBI that NASA whistleblowers “approached him, claiming that higher-ups had authorized the hiring of a contractor employee connected with an organization within China that federal agencies already had red-flagged as a potential national security threat.” Congressman Wolf stated that the subject contract employee was a Chinese national �...

In a report that surfaced today, members of the Anonymous collective report to have obtained information regarding surveillance efforts by Bank of America against activists. Sources report that activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Anonymous collective, and other private citizens were targeted by efforts of Bank of America and at least one other IT contractor by the name of TEKSystems. One of the most interesting details of this story is that no servers were hacked to obtain this ...

  The day after Google removed from China to Hong Kong, we already have confirmation that Hong Kong will not assist China in censoring Google's search results, even though the results will be available to Chinese users. Here is a synopsis from BusinessWeek:  "Hong Kong says it won’t help China censor Google Inc., after the search engine provider said it would route mainland users through its site in the city. Hong Kong respects freedom of information and its free flow, a spokesman for th...

Well Google is leaving China, sort of. Here's the story from Mercury News: "Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country. It's an attempt to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market. On Monday afternoon, visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong. The page said...

They may have been 99.9% certain they were going to pull out of China before, but now a date has been set for Google to leave China, at least according to one insider. This escalation has been in the works for the past few months (see my stories here, here, and here). The insider claims April 10th will be the day. Read this excerpt from CNET: "Google is expected to announce on Monday that it will withdraw from China on April 10, according to a report in a Beijing-based newspaper that cited ...

  According to recent research, anti-virus programs are not giving us full protection against hackers, such as the Chinese hackers who targeted Google recently. Take a look at this story from Prweb.com: "NSS Labs, Inc., the leading independent security testing organization, today announced the results of its evaluation of seven popular consumer endpoint security products in protecting the vulnerability exploited in the recent 'Operation Aurora' attack conducted against Google and at least 3...

Just was sent this article from cnet.com, hard to say if this was Microsoft's work or not, but appears to be counter-hacker hackers. Here is a quote: "The world's largest botnet, Zeus, has had its traffic disrupted by repeated disconnections of a Kazakhstani ISP, but a series of reconnections has revived its banking Trojan activity, according to security researchers. The botnet mainly pushes out the Zeus banking Trojan, an information-stealing keylogger that relays sensitive data back to its...

More news on the Google / China feud, here are some excerpts from ft.com: "Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now '99.9 per cent' certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, ...

I've obtained a copy of the temporary restraining order that Microsoft obtained to shut down the Waledac botnet (which I reported on earlier here). The temporary restraining order is viewable here. If there has been no further legal action, the temporary restraining order expired yesterday. I am working on obtaining access to the court file to confirm whether or not Microsoft has gotten an extension to the order or if there have been any changes, but the court file is behind the PACER paywall...

Google's recent cyber-security problems, which lead the company to threaten to pull out of China if the Chinese government refused to lift internet censorship, may have been perpetrated by a few junior college and university students. According to the New York Times, experts investigating the incursion have pointed to the Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanziang Vocational School in the Shandong Province.   A few weeks ago the Jiaotong University won the international "Battle of the Bra...